How to Grow your Landscaping Company in the Winter
Don’t let that chilly Canadian winter freeze your landscaping business growth!
Even though frigid temperatures are likely to bring a slowdown to your business, especially when compared to the typically busy spring and summer seasons, there is no need to back off of business growth for your landscaping company during this down season!
Winter can be the perfect time to take a breather, step back and take action at the highest levels of your business.
Even if you don’t offer off-season landscaping services (such as snow removal, ice management, winter landscape lighting, etc.) you can still take a lot of action to grow your business. This off-season could be your chance to reorient your landscaping company and get a leg up on the competition come spring.
Key Takeaways
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A strong website is a major competitive advantage to any landscaping business. Most landscaping companies don’t get this right.
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Winter is an ideal time to work on your long-term business and marketing strategies. It’s perfect timing to swap your operator hat for your owner hat.
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The off-season is ripe to remarket and re-engage former customers. We have a strict policy with our landscaping partners called, “no lead left behind.”
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This winter could give you time to critically evaluate prioritizing more seasonal services, depending on your location, resources, and current market demand.
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You have to plan well in advance to attract and retain amazing staff. Recruiting and staff planning should take place far before the busy spring and summer months.
Improve Your Website in the Winter Season
We’re always flabbergasted by the number of landscaping businesses that have an outdated website with a poor user experience. Talk about leaving money on the table!
With the majority of new landscaping customers searching for services online, you would think this would be priority number #1 for any landscaping business owner. Alas, it’s usually only a small minority of businesses that have invested in creating an outstanding website.
Don’t fret though if your website is old and outdated. That just means you have a nice opportunity to grow your business heading into the new year. Spending a little bit of time and money in the winter season improving your website could give you a big return to your bottom line come high season.
Even if you’re happy with your current website design, there may be some areas where it could use a refresh or technical update. We offer a free website audit, which looks at factors such as on-page content, page speed, navigation, technical SEO, and more.
Develop Your Long Term Marketing Strategy over the Winter Months
Winter is a great time to set goals for your landscaping business as well as develop a long-term marketing strategy. Landscaping business owners also tend to have more time and mental bandwidth during the off-season.
The winter season also tends to coincide with the fiscal year-end on January 1st, so this makes it an opportune time to plan. We often schedule our yearly marketing strategy for our landscaping partners later in the year so they can kick off with a bang in January.
Winter is also the time of year when topics such as seasonal cash flow, staffing, and specific service prioritization are top of mind.
We help landscaping companies reverse engineer an entire year’s worth of marketing budget, strategy, and tactics by reverse engineering from their 1, 3, and 5-year growth and profit goals. Professional landscapers understand how important planning ahead is, setting a marketing budget, and using the slow season to get a head start on their competitors.
No Lead Left Behind
We have a strict “no lead left behind” process we roll out for our landscaping clients.
One of the easiest ways to let revenue slip through the cracks is poor follow-up and re-engagement with previous customers.
Setting up systems to continually engage, or re-engage previous customers is crucial to the continued growth of your landscaping or lawn care business. This is true for both current recurring service customers such as lawn maintenance and snow removal contracts, as well as one-off clients that will likely require future landscaping services.
Our landscaper marketing machine utilizes marketing automation, retargeting, and more to ensure that you don’t miss out on any of this potential business.
Off-Season Services
As part of our yearly strategic planning, we consult with our landscaping partners not only on revenue growth but also profitability and business efficiency. We challenge them to consider their business from all angles and are always striving to grow and improve.
We typically examine every service a landscaping company offers from each possible angle: logistics, staffing, fixed costs, variable costs, net profit margin, market demand, market saturation, etc.
When it comes to the winter months and off-season we like to ask questions and see if there are solutions to leverage current staff, machinery, reputation, past clients, and partnerships to grow off-season cash flow, revenue opportunities, and profitable winter jobs. Some service areas of growth, depending on where in Canada you operate, could include a focus on hardscapes, installing holiday lights or Christmas lights, all-season exterior lighting upgrades, evaluating potential residential and commercial snow removal and de-icing opportunities, landscape design services, leaf removal, weed removal, lawn care services and more.
Depending on your resources, location, and competition, it could make good fiscal sense to invest in growing or reprioritizing off-season services. There may be major profit generators in the winter months worth exploring. Book a complimentary call with us to learn more.
Business Evaluation
In addition to long-term marketing strategy, the winter can also be a good time to time to evaluate your business more holistically.
This could include taking a deeper dive into your seasonal cash flow projections, securing or reviewing financing options, completing an equipment inventory, evaluating partners and suppliers, and researching technology that could help grow your business.
We find that many landscaping business owners spend too much time working in their business and not enough time working on their business. Carving out a little bit of time, especially when it’s more readily available in the slower season, can save you a ton of time and money in the long run.
Staffing & Recruitment
One of the biggest bottlenecks to growth and profitability for landscapers today is hiring and retaining great people.
This is particularly challenging for businesses that have a heavy emphasis on high-season services. This requires that they continually hire and lay off seasonal staff with a lot of inefficient employee churn. There is a big cost to recruiting, training, and retaining. You have to plan and prepare months in advance to recruit and retain amazing staff.
Having a robust recruitment process, a comprehensive vetting system, a strong network of staffing partners, and a solid promotion and marketing strategy are vital to maintaining the bones of your company!
One of our key services is helping and advising landscaping companies on staff recruitment. This is another reason hiring a marketing partner that specializes in your industry vertical is beneficial – we understand the challenges landscaping companies face and are closely tuned in to the macroeconomic variables that affect their bottom line.
Winter doesn’t have to be a slow season for your landscaping business.
With the right strategies in place, you can continue growing your business even when the weather outside is frightful. Contact Landscaper Marketing today and let us help you make this winter season your best yet! We specialize in winter landscaping marketing, and we can help you reach your target audience even when they’re bundled up indoors. From Google Ad campaigns to targeted email marketing, we’ll help you craft a plan that will keep your phones ringing all winter long. So don’t let the chilly weather slow you down – call Landscaper Marketing today.
Our Landscaper Marketing Team
We pride ourselves on providing our clients with a comprehensive suite of services that can help them achieve their goals. Whether you’re looking for someone to help you produce high-quality video and image content, rank you higher in search engines, curate a social media marketing strategy, or need assistance with paid search advertising, we have the experts who can help. Our team of landscaping content marketing experts can create digital marketing assets that will make you shine online. And, our backend advertising wizards know how to leverage these assets in the most efficient way possible. So, if you’re looking for a complete solution to help you achieve your objectives, look no further than Landscaper Marketing.
Start Growing Your Landscaping Company Now!
Reach out today for a no strings attached consultation with Chris, our very tall and friendly Director of Client Relationships, and learn how we help landscaping companies grow.
Learn how we helped a landscaping company grow to 1 million in revenue per month from online sources alone.
See how we helped a permeable hardscapes company become an online juggernaut.
Or check out how we helped a landscape company reach the coveted 10M a year mark.
We help grow Canadian landscaping companies that currently make 2M+ per year in revenues. Need some more proof?
Check out our Landscaper Marketing Machine, Blogs, or reach out today for a free, no strings attached consultation to see if you qualify for our Canadian Landscaper Program.
Whatever you do, don’t forget to leverage the power of Google My Business when developing your landscaping company’s online presence. With it, you can boost organic visibility and local search rankings with relative ease. So make sure to include this powerful tool in your overall digital marketing strategy. Good luck!
